Phrases
What people actually say, organized by the situation you find yourself in.
Phrasebooks tend to fail Arabic learners in two specific ways. They give a single "Arabic" translation that is in fact Modern Standard Arabic and would sound strange spoken in a taxi or a market, or they give a colloquial form without telling you which country it works in. The pages in this section try to do better. Every entry is labelled by register — MSA, Egyptian, Levantine, Gulf, or Maghrebi — and where a phrase shifts meaning across regions, that is noted too. The Arabic script, a transliteration, and an English meaning appear together for every phrase, so you can read the script as your eye learns it and lean on the transliteration in the meantime.
If you are starting from zero, work through greetings, introductions, please and thank you, and farewells first — these are the daily scaffolding of any conversation, and the patterns repeat in nearly every other situation. From there, the order is yours: travellers usually want travel, directions, dining, and shopping, while learners staying longer in one place will get more from small talk and business and work. The pages on condolences, congratulations, and religious phrases in daily speech are short but useful out of all proportion to their length: these are the moments where getting the wording right matters most, and where translation tools tend to be unreliable.
Throughout, we resist the urge to flatten things. شكراً (shukran, "thank you") is universal; the natural reply, though, varies — عفواً (ʿafwan) in MSA, العفو (il-ʿafw) in Levantine speech, and a dozen warmer phrases when someone really wants to be polite. Where there is a single best answer, we give it. Where there isn't, we say so.
Pages in this section
- →Greetings
- →Introductions
- →Farewells
- →Please, thank you, and sorry
- →Travel
- →Directions
- →Dining and ordering
- →Shopping and bargaining
- →Numbers, days, and telling time
- →Weather and small talk
- →Health and the doctor
- →Emergencies
- →Love and relationships
- →Condolences
- →Congratulations and good wishes
- →Religious phrases in daily speech
- →Business and work